Comitter guide: rewrite the section on testing.

[eadler]

Summary

• The previous version felt a little condescending or blame-y. Rewrite

to reduce the blame on the individual but still make strong statements
about needing to test

[jhb]

en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/committers-guide/article.xml

3476–3477

This opening sentence feels too hand-wavy now. While the older one was more snarky, I prefer it to this one. OTOH, maybe something like:

"This may sound obvious, but developers do occasionally break the build. Merging a change tested against an older base revision may break the build or fail to work due to a mismerge. A change may work on one architecture but fail to compile on others, often for seemingly small changes such as &man.printf.3; format strings. Use <command>make tinderbox</command> to compile changes on all supported architectures before committing.

When committing changes to a stable or release branch, always test your changes on a machine
running that branch. Changes to these branches should not introduce build breakages. If merging a change from HEAD which broke the build or introduced regressions, include followup fixes from HEAD in the merge as a single commit.

Refer to the <link ..."

3495

s/resources to help test/testing resources/

[eadler]

per @jhb

[eadler]

I took some of your suggestions. Shortened it a bit.

[brooks]

en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/committers-guide/article.xml

3479

s/fail/may fail/ ?

3484

fragment?

[eadler]

format

[eadler]

en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/committers-guide/article.xml

3479

The conditional is at the start of the sentence.

[jhb]

en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/committers-guide/article.xml

3479

Eh, it's not. Here is the sentence in isolation:

"Merging a change against an older base revision fail due to a mismerge."

It definitely needs a 'can' or 'may' before 'fail'.

Also, I do prefer the longer text I had to separate 'build break' from 'fail to work'. I think it's useful to be explicit that this is not just about compile errors but also runtime errors.

3484

I think it's a valid sentence. It's a command / imperative, so the subject is implicit.

[emaste]

This still seems like a useful incremental improvement

[jhb]

I do think it's worth merging, but at the very list the "fail" needs a "may" or "can" in front of it.

[emaste]

needs to be refreshed for the asciidoc conversion